Thomson Reuters exploring consumer video service - Tom Glocer

“We sort of have a consumer following, almost less by intention and more just because people find and, thank God, trust us in particular in crisis and in particular with respect to international serious news and economics, they turn to Reuters.com or some of the apps we have,” Glocer said at the Le Web conference in Paris on Thursday.

“We are thinking about, whether we couldn’t, the time isn't right, to aggregate a serious international audience.

“We’re a fairly serious company. We’re unlikely to put the pretty blonde on the couch to read news to you or to have banter back and forth about ‘Hey, you know, how was the game last night?’ And the challenge in traditional broadcast has been to reach a large enough audience to monetise the advertising or to pay back the cost of cable carriage, or even in the old days in newspapers to pay back distribution and the printing plant you had to go quite broad… 

“But the neat thing about what the Internet has done for us all is, it is now possible to aggregate the smaller proportion, let’s say, of Americans who listen to NPR, might watch the BBC, read The Economist, etc, and the equal or larger number of Germans and French who do, into an international audience. You still have the language issue, but, you know, this conference is in English, so we’re looking at whether there actually might now be a time to do more of it.” ■